[Commentary] President Obama has made a welcome break with the Bush administration's disregard for enforcing antitrust law. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have become more aggressive about questioning mergers and challenging monopolies and anticompetitive behavior. But antitrust regulation still suffers from an unwillingness to challenge "vertical integration," in which companies, suppliers and customers become intertwined and a few corporations can control all aspects of their industry. Such is the case in the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which was approved with some limitations by the Justice Department's antitrust division recently. Ideally, the merger should not have been. The Justice Department challenged the "horizontal" consolidation of the companies' overlapping ticketing businesses. But it was weaker when it came to dealing with the perils that arise from the emergence of a company that will operate on every level of its business.
